Aviation

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin, and to have the Minister respond to the debate.

My interest in airports first came about because, at a time when many boys want to be train drivers, my younger brother had an ambition to be an airport manager. Consequently, whenever we went on holiday, my indulgent parents would take us to the airport four or five hours before we needed to be there, and my brother would go around and catalogue the catering outlets and investigate the cleaning rosters. I was delighted, a few years later, when he decided that he actually wanted to be a doctor.

As an economist, I worked for a short period on airline alliances, but my most significant involvement with aviation came 10 years ago when, following a leak in the Financial Times a few months earlier, the then Labour Government published the “South East and East of England Regional Air Services Study”—SERAS—which proposed an airport twice the size of Heathrow at a location it described as Cliffe, in the constituency I now represent. Then as now, many felt that that was a stalking horse to make airport expansion elsewhere seem more attractive by comparison.

Our first response was to look at that airport study, which we noted excluded any consideration of Gatwick expansion, on the basis that there was a planning agreement, and it looked no further at that idea at all. I was sort of blooded on that issue when I first asked whether that decision was perhaps irrational and something that would be questioned by the courts. Initially, a judicial review was proposed, which ultimately led to the Labour Government being forced to consider the case for a second runway at Gatwick, even though they had previously decided against it.

The debate that took place showed that an estuary airport would be environmentally devastating, and that the economics simply did not add up. I and many others were delighted to campaign with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Friends of North Kent Marshes, and many others who made the case that having a huge airport in the middle of Europe’s leading wetland landscape, with its millions of birds, was probably not a good idea.

The assumption by some that no people live in that area and that there would be no opposition was put paid to by more than 20,000 people who live on the broader Hoo peninsula, and who would suffer egregiously from such an airport. In addition, large numbers of people live on both sides of the estuary, and any flights taking off in a westerly direction would create new flight paths over heavily populated areas of London. The idea that such an airport would somehow be a problem-free solution that people would not complain about is, to coin a phrase, for the birds.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

To follow on from that, one point made by advocates of the estuary solution is that the area is crying out for new jobs. Does my hon. Friend agree that that ignores the economic growth that is already happening, particularly in south Essex, with the expansion of the port? That is the future of the estuary—ports, not airports.

[Mark Reckless]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I congratulate her on her work in campaigning for economic development in her area. The fundamental point is that although jobs might be created—I do not deny that there would be a lot of jobs; perhaps 200,000, as some estimates suggest—they would come 10, 15 or 20 years from now, and would be almost entirely taken by a vast migration of people who would be forced to uproot themselves, perhaps from around Heathrow, and move to a new area. In terms of Government engineering, I cannot see the case for that in a free society.